Getting (more) comfortable making hard decisions

When I was first promoted to VP, my manager gave me their standard tongue-in-cheek promotion speech: “Congratulations! Also, my condolences. You’ll be held to an even higher standard, and even more people will be disappointed in your decisions every day.”

They were being funny, but there was a little truth to that speech too.

As my scope grew over the years, I started learning that if I’m seeing a problem, there’s no easy answer — or someone would’ve solved it before it got to me.

Not finding a perfect solution hurts my pride! I know going into every hard decision that the outcome will be dissatisfying to someone, whether I have to tell a team their idea is great but not high-priority enough to fund given resource constraints, or that new info from our users means we need to delay an exciting product a team has been working hard on.

What helps me navigate through this?

1. Get comfortable with the reality of my role. The best way I can help our customers is by using whatever info I have to choose the best solution I can — knowing there’s not a perfect answer.  And I need to form that opinion fast enough to unblock my teams. That’s an explicit change from a lifetime of priding myself on finding perfect outcomes.
   

2. Figure out my guiding principles for making decisions in this role. Depending on the role, these could be:

   1. What will help X specific set of users most in 3-5 years?

   2. What is the best balance between product completeness and shipping speed to create the most utility for X customers before their busy season?

   3. What solution best balances the needs of all of our audiences this year?
      
      Having consistent, authentic principles gives me a compass to guide a decision through all the tradeoffs.
      

3. Include those principles when communicating the outcome. I summarize the entire solution set, acknowledge how hard the decision is, and describe why the principles pointed me in a particular direction. That way, even if people disagree with the outcome, they can see their voice was included as we weighed options, and which criteria and information led us here.

In a world where it can feel like there’s pressure to be “perfect” as a leader, discovering that any decision I make *has* to be inherently imperfect is a struggle.

I can’t chase the satisfaction of wrapping a bow around a problem and knowing I’ve found the perfect solution.

Instead, I need to get comfortable with the fact that hard decisions don’t have perfect solutions.  And the best way for me to help my team and our users is by honing the principles that will help me choose and own those decisions.